wireless issues: wlan-ng drivers
 

i just recently acquired a LINKSYS WMP11 (one w/out the broadcom chipset) that has the PRISM 2.5 WAVELAN CHIPSET. after reading the contents of www.linux-wlan.org, i determined that i needed to compile drivers for my wireless card from the sources provided online.

relevant software specs: running 2.4.21 KERNEL in SLACKWARE 9.0

from the documentation that came w/ the router i got (NETGEAR MR814v2) i'm to understand that one must communicate w/ the router via DHCP to get a local IP.

i've followed the instructions provided w/ the wlan-ng files and gotten mixed results:

(1) i installed wlan-ng w/out problems, but i had already installed the "development" driver for the TI ACX100 chipset (wait, this will be explained). once i had installed the wlan-ng, it gave me a DCHP acknowledgement at bootup and gave the remote computer a local IP (192.168.0.2) automatically (it communicated w/ the router). needless to say, i was quite happy, but i decided "let's just tune a couple of other drivers out of the kernel now and recompile and everything should work again." the lasting presence of the ACX100 driver is what prompted this, and i should've left it alone.

(2) now i don't get any sort of DHCP acknowledgement upon installation of the wlan-ng drivers (even after reinstalling slackware!), but the wlan0 device shows up when i issue "iwconfig."

other info i have on hand is as follows:

output from lspci -v:

00:0b.0 Network controller: Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset (rev 01)
Subsystem: Linksys WMP11 Wireless 802.11b PCI Adapter
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
Memory at d9000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

relevant bits from dmesg:

Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
options: [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
ds: no socket drivers loaded!
init_module: prism2_pci.o: 0.2.0 Loaded
init_module: dev_info is: prism2_pci
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:0b.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:07.2
A Prism2.5 PCI device found, phymem:0xd9000000, irq:11, mem:0xd0869000
hermes.c: 4 Dec 2002 David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
orinoco.c 0.13b (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)
orinoco_pci.c 0.13b (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> & Jean Tourrilh
es <jt@hpl.hp.com>)
parport0: PC-style at 0x378 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP]
parport_pc: Via 686A parallel port: io=0x378
hermes.c: 4 Dec 2002 David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
orinoco.c 0.13b (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)

.... repeat this a bunch of times

orinoco.c 0.13b (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)
orinoco_pci.c 0.13b (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> & Jean Tourrilh
es <jt@hpl.hp.com>)
spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.

contents of iwconfig:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11-b Mode:Auto Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Encryption key:off

what gives here? i'm quite confused as to what i should try next.